Speakeasy forum: I'd like to have a man to man discussion....

getting caught out back of the school one day? Teacher probably let him leave early every day so he could get a head start running before a bully could set him straight.

playground bully as a good influence keeping those pesky smart kids who ask inconvenient questions in line. Very totalitarian in the attitude it reveals. That's precisely how the Nazi Party operated before it was elected (in a minority) to the Reichstag.

You really do need to examine your attitudes and responses, James. They do show totalitarian inclinations.

Please note, I have not attributed anything to you but an inclination to wish for a bully to shut the inquisitive and opinionated kid up. I have a vague memory of Freedom of Speech being praised and enshrined in the First Law of the United States foundation.

Rob

He was a Tanzanian or Kenyan student admitted on a Student Visa to study first in Hawaii and then at Harvard. He then returned to settle in Kenya. I don't think he was ever interested in immigrating to the US, but that question is immaterial.

Obama's citizenship proceeds from his Hawaiian birth irrespective of his parents nationalities though, as is quite well known, his mother was American born and bred. She worked in various forms of Non Governmental Organizations both in Kenya and Indonesia before returning to the US and continuing to work to support herself and her son.

Rob

though he seems to have a better character (as in he hasn't been accused of sexual shenanigans). I watch MSNBC partly for him but mostly for Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell, and formerly for Keith Olbermann who was by far the best editorialist. Maddow and O'Donnell are more reporters, though in the Fox mould including their own opinions.

Even I find Chris irritating and too loud and inclined to go off half-cocked. He is a great stimulator of discussion, and asker of otherwise neglected questions.

He is, I believe, an Irish Catholic from inner city Philly (but I may be wrong about this) who grew up fighting as the Irish do. I'd suggest that your desire to meet him in a dark alley might be ill-advised.

He is very well informed politically but, in my opinion, a little too fond of the sound of his own voice.

The comment about Hurricane Sandy, however, was entirely on-point. Obama's response to Hurricane Sandy was in stark contrast to Bush's response to Katrina, and has been recognized by the general public as distinctly Presidential. I think that it was a crucial component of his ability to sway the uncommitted.

President Obama isn't able to fix everybody's utility problems all by himself. It is up to the Utilitiy Companies to do the repairs themselves, and they're swamped. President Obama doesn't have a magic wand he can wave to make things instantly better, or he'd have used it at the end of the 2007-2009 Banking and Wall Street crisis. All he can do is mobillize FEMA and other Emergency Agencies to provide the assistance they are legislated to provide.

If Obama had somehow mobilized an Electrical Strike Team to take over the responsibilities of the Utility companies, you'd have been yelling about Government Interference in Private Enterprise. Utility Companies cut costs by budgetting only for standard maintenance in normal weather. Even snow storms stretch them beyond their limits. That's all part of the normal Capitalist process of reducing operating costs, and though I would support the incorporation of a bit of a cushion into the process, I generally approve of how business manages itself in this respect.

A natural disaster touching so many States and involving so many different Utility Companies is very difficult to handle in terms of sheer scale and the number of Agencies and Utilities involved.

There's no easy answer to a situation like this. It was acknowledged before it struck as an unprecedentedly large storm colliding with a huge Cold Front, guaranteeing massive amounts of rain and winds. A natural disaster was a recognized given before Sandy ever came ashore.

Rob

O'Reilly comes across as about 5'6, with what my wife used to call "Small Man Syndrome". That is a kind of pushiness and arrogance as self defence for his small stature. Clearly he's 6'4" on the outside, and 5'4" on the inside.

Keith Olbermann on the other hand looked big on screen. I'd have put him at 6'4". God I miss him. His shows were so great in their choice of topics and guests, and Olbermann was, I thought, a very good interviewer as well as very, very funny with an enormous breadth of references, including some English humour which most Americans are unfamiliar with. He had a segment each night called Worst Person in the World featuring something outrageously stupid 3 people did or said that day, Bronze, Silver, and Gold. O'Reilly featured quite a lot and there was a very real feud between the two going on. Olbermann's name for O'Reilly was "Billo the Clown". Naturally Limbaugh featured regularly as did many of the Talk Radio idiots, and Republican Senators and Congressmen and Koran burning preachers. I think Joe Biden got called out a couple of times too. Olbermann was an equal opportunity caller of "Shame"

After his father died, Olbermann would read a James Thurber story each Friday night continuing the thing he did for his father while he was in hospital. Thurber was a noted humourist and cartoonist with terrible vision, coke bottle glasses, and needed to work on larger and larger sheets of paper, as in 2 feet by 3 feet in order to see the image. Olbermann's championing of Thurber actually lead Knopf to re-issue a famous collection in hard-back. I grew up reading Thurber from my parent's library (And H.L. Mencken, and S.J Pearlman and all the humourists from the New Yorker magazine of whom Thurber was one).

Rob